Apple announced today that it is cutting prices on its MacBook Pros with Retina display and even a MacBook Air model.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and 128GB of flash will now start at $1,499 (previously $1,699) while the model with 256GB of flash and a 2.6 GHz processor will start at $1,699 (previously $1,999).

The 13-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of flash also saw a price drop to $1,399.

The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display didn't see a price cut this round, but it did get a bump in specs. This model now offers a 2.4 GHz quad-core processor (previously 2.3 GHz) while the top-of-the-line version has a 2.7 GHz quad-core processor (previously 2.6 GHz) and 16GB of memory. The price remains the same at $2,799.

Apple is likely reducing prices ahead of a refreshed line of MacBook devices. All price changes and spec updates are available now.

That seems unnecessary. It's hard to argue that the rMBP is the best laptop on the market right now (for its purposes). Especially with bootcamp - you can't get a better display, and the hardware is decent and more than enough for gaming on certain title (and you really won't be doing hardcore gaming on a laptop for most people). And you absolutely can't find better build quality or customer service.

Yes, it's overpriced. But everything at the top end of a market is overpriced. A GTX 680 is overpriced, a rMBP is overpriced, a Bugatti Veyron (did I spell that right?) is overpriced. You can make do pretty fine with a 7870, reasonably priced 800-1200$ laptop for premium, or a 25,000$ car. But for people who have the money, they buy premium to get the best of everything - and it's hard to argue that the rMBP isn't the best.

Note: Obviously something like Sager can beat it for gaming, for half the cost. But you're getting silicon in a plastic shell, in a design that looks much uglier. When you compare it to the XPS15's, the Samsung Series 7's, and the Asus UX51, the rMBP really has them trumped for now though.

Although the new Samsung Series 7 reboot for 2013 looks REALLY tempting (currently own a S7 chronos 2012). I really want a SS7 Ultra.

Everything I just said doesn't extend to the MBA - it might when they catch up and provide a better display. It used to be better than what's on the market, but not so anymore.

Your comparison is silly. For a Macbook Pro to be equivalent to a Bugatti Veyron it would have to cost $100,000 (100x the price of a "normal" laptop) and massively outperform one. Not emphasise looks over performance.

Sure the Retina MacBook Pro is a nice product, but it's hardly that level of premium. It also has heat problems and the Windows drivers are sub par. It doesn't even support Optimus for no good reason.

LOL OMG, also a Bugatti Veyron is a CAR and a Macbook Pro is a computer. Also, Bugatti starts with the letter "B" and Macbook starts with a letter "M." That guy must have gone to stupid school or something.

Well first of all yes. I compared a 2.8 million dollar car to a 20,000$ one.

So fine. If you want to be like that, a ford focus at 20,000$ is perfectly capable of being a nice car. It does literally everything you need, and gets good mileage. You don't NEED that 5 series BMW. But if you have the money, people buy premium for a reason.

Comparing the MBP to my Samsung Series 7 that cost 1100$, I spent half as much money. The build quality is significantly worse, the trackpad is worse, the screen is shit, and the hardware is worse (3615QM + GT640M + 750GB HDD, 6GB RAM, and an SSD Cache that I think is mSata). There is a clear, discernible difference between the rMBP and my computer.

And yes, the MBP has heat problems, but so does every other computer with that hardware in that chassis. The thicker dell XPS15 has heat problems with a slower GPU and CPU (35W quad core). My SS7 doesn't throttle, but it isn't cool by any means (same as the MBP). Asus' UX51VZ with identical hardware as the MBP throttles. I don't know anything about the Envy series, but I know HP's dv6 series throttles. At least the MBP gets hot, but doesn't throttle (see Anandtech's review). If you want to compare it to a 2 inch Sager, of course the heat problems will be significantly worse.

All that said, do I regret my purchase? Not really. I got the most hardware for the buck I could in a thin chassis with solid battery life. Is the rMBP a better computer? Hell yeah it is. I would kill for that screen alone.

Supporting Optimus on windows... i don't know. It's built to run OSX, not windows. Does Hackintosh support Optimus? (I'm not trying to be condescending with this, I just don't know). Optimus works fine on OSX though.

Your post read like a macolyte trying to pass for a normal person. The gpu is too underpowered to drive anything serious at those resolutions, and chances are an intelligent person will dial back the resolution to what is normal, which kind defeats the purpose of having a retina screen. I don't understand your arguement that it is worth it to pay more money for nothing.

I own a 7 Series gamer(yellow chassis, hi-res 17.3 screen, i7-3630qm, 7870m, 1tb hdd $1500), there is nothing that a similarly equipped MacBook has to justify the price difference.So you to bring up a flawed car analogy? A ford focus vs a BMW 5, wtf? One may pay more for a 5 but they get a bigger car, bigger and better engine, better interior, better wheels and tires, better suspension and road handling characteristics, better safety features, better entertainment and connectivity the list goes on. The two cars are worlds apart. You get less with a macbook vs an equally priced laptop. Sure it made out of aluminum but the only benefit to that this point is that it's light and not plastic, the retina screen marginally pointless as I stated above, and inferior hardware for more money? I don't follow.

and have to say that your criticism against build quality, and the screen need to be taken with a grain of salt, I'm not going to refute your claims leveled at the trackpad as I hate all trackpads in general, and prefer to use a mouse. Sure it's not made out of aluminum but it doesn't flex, keyboards feels solid and responsive. Can't say anything definite about the screen without a side by side, but it isn't bad at all

And using cars as an analogy to compare things use cars that are in the same class e.g. Ford mustang vs a 3 series coupe and not an economy compact vs a supercar+ or a performance full size sedan, that's just silly.

Am I the only one that thought his analogy is apt? His point was that people pay exhorbitant price premiums just to say that they have the very best product. Happens with cars, computers, clothes, furniture, etc. Just about anything you can think of. Bugatti is a valid example. So is rMBP, certainly in terms of its screen. I'm not aware of any laptop with DPI in the same league as the rMBP.

The Bugatti Veyron is a horrible example. The Bugatti is without a doubt the greatest automobile ever wrought by man. It's an absolute marvel of engineering achievement. Maybe one of the greatest engineering accomplishments in mankind's history. Nearly everything about the car was judged as being "impossible" by the so-called experts. The transmission for example was "impossible". They were told that any transmission they could fathom would "fly apart" at having to push that much torque through an AWD system.

Comparing this to a MBA is asinine. For the MBA to the laptop equivalent to the Veyron, it would have to outperform every other laptop by a factor of 10, for EVERY category. CPU, RAM, USB speeds, everything.

You miss the point. He's not comparing a macbook to a car. He's saying people are willing to pay a premium for a rMBP because it has something you can't get anywhere else. People are also willing to pay a premium for a Veyron because it has something you can't get anywhere else. Hence, they are similar in that regard.

The retina display is a feature aimed at professionals. Not pointless but not for everyone either, at least not until it trickles down to the mainstream MBA line. The aspect important more important than resolution IMHO is that its an extremely well calibrated 16:9 sRGB IPS display. That is something missing in most desktop displays (you're spending over $1200 for a comparable but non-retina NEC desktop monitor), and forget laptop displays that are almost all uniformly terrible.

It is just about reference quality and its in a notebook, which is crazy.

As for horsepower, they pack as much as what can fit in that slim chassis. If you think that a high-end Kepler GPU and i7 CPU in the 15" model is underpowered then I don't know what to say.

If you need something like a GTX 680m in your laptop then there are other options out there, just expect a 10lb laptop with a 2" chassis and 90 minutes of battery life rather than a 4lb one with 7 hours of battery life. The fact that they packed that much horsepower and quality in something that slim is amazing.

The 13" rMBP will obviously benefit more with Haswell and I'm telling people to wait for it. That said, having used one myself it is actually very smooth on the desktop. I was surprised. Then again, it has the same resolution as a 30" desktop display, and you can also run those smoothly with a 13" MBA.

I'd still wait on Haswell though, but that goes for any other ultraslim or x86 tablet.

quote: and have to say that your criticism against build quality, and the screen need to be taken with a grain of salt

The Anandtech podcast has spent so much time complaining about how badly other laptop makers need to work at getting their machines up to the level of Apple's that its almost become a tradition. Should their criticisms about component quality be taken with a grain of salt? Other OEMs need to step it up bigtime.

quote: Your post read like a macolyte trying to pass for a normal person.

Ah yes, the old "this post sounds reasonable and informed but since you're saying anything positive about an Apple product you must be brainwashed" argument. Awesome.

I was talking about the 15" model. I started talking about the 13" model further down. Reading comprehension!

quote: You're talking about a 10 bit display. Trust me, the "retina" isn't even CLOSE to sniffing that.

Color gamut is not the same thing as color accuracy. Out of the factory it is damn close to sRGB and is thus appropriate for color managed work. Do an additional hardware calibration pass yourself and its in a different league from any other notebook out there.

We've recently started using them on set to show preliminary color correction, and its damn close to a final.

quote: I'm sure you'll just say whatever, like you just did, to prop up Apple.

Meh, I don't care about the brand, just the quality of whatever it is I'm using. I wouldn't have said "wait" for Haswell to get into a 13" rMBP if I was propping them up at any cost.

I certainly wouldn't tell someone to do final color work on a pre-retina MBP, I'd tell them to plug into a proper monitor like I always have. The new models are a different story, they totally work in a pinch.

Ok, a rant on color accuracy because people don't seem to know what they're talking about with 8-bit vs 10-bit, sRGB vs wide gamut, etc etc.

A larger color gamut does not imply greater color accuracy. In fact, with wide gamut screens the opposite is usually true.

Almost all content people view is intended for the sRGB color space because sRGB is the standard for the internet. sRGB is also equivalent to the ITU 709 standard color space used for HDTV, which is also very close to the SMPTE and EBU color spaces used for NTSC and PAL video. sRGB is not some antiquated irrelevant color space, it is actually the current standard. Since it shares primaries with the current broadcast standard it's not going away any time soon.

Many wide gamut monitors have an sRGB mode, so you can avoid color management issues most of the time and only use the wide gamut if you need it (which for most people, is never). However, wide gamut notebook screens don't seem to offer that option, so you're basically screwed unless you don't mind looking at distorted, inaccurate, oversaturated colors in anything that isn't properly color managed.

This leads to the fact that very few applications outside of the image viewing & editing category are color managed. Being color managed means they can recognize the color space embedded in an image's metadata (ie - sRGB) and use OS services to translate color values from the image's color space to the color space of the output device (ie - your wide gamut screen). Anything that isn't color managed just sends color values straight to the screen without translation, which means you get distorted colors unless the screen is calibrated to the same color space the image uses.

The main problem is that applications that that aren't properly color managed include all web browsers except Firefox with a plug-in, most video players (including WMP and VLC), all games, the Windows desktop background, and Windows UI elements and icons. That means that even if you calibrate your wide gamut display and install the resulting profile, most of time it isn't being used and you're looking at distorted colors. This is also why its important that more of OS X is color managed than Windows.

With wide gamut you are trading off color resolution and accuracy in the middle of the color space where it's most important in order to cover parts of the color space that are much rarer to find in real life.

This becomes a moot point if you have 10-bit color values, but only if you have a 10-bit path all the way through (application, OS, video driver, GPU, and display panel) which again is extremely rare.

So now let's say you have the holy grail, a 30-bit 100% AdobeRGB screen that is color calibrated and matches the AdobeRGB standard perfectly, and you have ideal applications and an OS where everything is properly calibrated and you have a 10-bit path all the way through.

That display won't look any different than if you had a calibrated 100% sRGB screen unless you're specifically working with photos shot in AdobeRGB.

For video it would look the same. For web browsing it would look the same. For games, the same. OS & application graphics and icons, the same.

If you're working with AdobeRGB, ie - large format high end digital commercial still photography in a professional print-based workflow, then its a different story, and those people spend a fortune on Eizo desktop monitors to do their work with. The other exception is maybe the occasional hobbyist who shoots in AdobeRGB and cares about how his photos look only on his own monitor.

tldr - We live in an sRGB/Rec.709 world. This hardware is more than enough to do color accurate work for the web or video.

And speaking of FUD and defending at any cost, you and retro in the "Android malware" story from last weekend was amazing.

I stayed out because I wanted to see what silly excuses you'd come up with without interference, and I wasn't disappointed. Seeing you two spin excuses, deflections, and lies all weekend against all of the other smart and reasonable people in there was beyond hilarious.

Numerous people in there made the same points I would have (and have in the past), and they made you look like fools. The only thing my presence would have done is add rage to the thread, but that's your problem, not mine.

quote: We all know YOU love a closed system for many of the benefits, security being one of them, but that doesn't make you right.

It also has better apps, smoother and faster UI performance, excellent screens and battery life, things like that. I'll take it over almost uniformly inferior hardware (Droid DNA is one of the few that stacks up), inferior apps, etc. It isn't for everyone but its fine for me, no reason to get mad.

I am NOT interested in another Android vs iOS debate at nearly midnight. This thread isn't even ABOUT that. What the F is wrong with you? Honestly is this all you think about?

How did we even get on this? I'm pretty sure it wasn't from something I said.

quote: It also has better apps, smoother and faster UI performance, excellent screens and battery life, things like that. I'll take it over almost uniformly inferior hardware (Droid DNA is one of the few that stacks up), inferior apps, etc. It isn't for everyone but its fine for me, no reason to get mad.

*whistles*... wow...umm okay? Just wow man. Seriously seek help.

I'm not mad, far from it. I'm genuinely and honestly perplexed and a bit concerned about your mental health. I simply do not understand this bizarre personal validation you and Tony get from aligning yourself with a consumer electronic device.

We're talking about laptops. I come home from dinner at a friends, and you suddenly make it about iOS vs Android all over again. Out of the blue. COMPLETELY unprovoked by me or anyone else. See anything wrong with this?

quote: How did we even get on this? I'm pretty sure it wasn't from something I said.

I brought it up because the hypocrisy of your head-spinning defense there while accusing others of doing the same, especially when they back up their points with balance and logic rather than emotion and rhetoric, is hilarious.

Isn't that much obvious when he regurgitates the same shit day in and day out? I bet he sits and hits refresh on the screen every couple of seconds waiting for someone to respond to pounce on them like a rabid dog.

The 640 is rubbish, less then a 100 euro video card way below my standards for work and gaming, for the rest are very good specs and I really into those high res monitors since I work on Photoshop, and aftereffects for most of my day. Aftereffects is very cpu and graphics intensive it would cripple any I7 without a decent video card

As monitor I use 2 dell 27 inch IPS monitors at 2.5k res they pretty cheap around 800 euro but they don't support usb3 so probably I will be replacing them with the 2013 model.

As for my laptop monitor is 18.4 inch, 1080p monitor quite crisp but still I am never able to get work done on it since the monitor is too small for Photoshop/Webdesign (still I wonder how people manage to work on 15 inch screens), so I only use my laptop for word processing / email etc.

If you're doing any sort of intensive work on a non-Mac with a dGPU, it won't matter if it had Optimus. Let's face it, many folks who use Windows on a Mac do it for work and gaming, neither of which are suitable uses for a HD4000 iGPU anyway.

Level headed Apple supporter reporting in. I think valid points were made about premium tax concerning Apple. I am excited to see competition on the retina and ultra book front from PC manufacturers. My one gripe with the current state of PC is software, however. What takes my experience from Ford Focus to Bugatti is not the aluminum, but the Unix. I think OS X is the best OS out there. If I could buy a thinkpad and run an optimized object-oriented unix/entry-level GUI then I probably would not pay Apple tax. I can't, however. This is why I return to Apples laptops.

Cygwin won't do, linux is a fulltime job (ideally for sysadmins), and Apple repeatedly sets the standard. I don't mind the tax.

PS. I have ran HPC linux clusters (running GAMESS and NAMD/CUDA) and have published >10 papers on mathematical modeling. The work was done on windows, mac, and linux workstations, but, by far, Mac OS X ran circles around all the other machines as far as Terminal/SSH/X11 integration and MS Office/Photoshop/Mathematica integration.I guess my point is that the argument that Apple users don't know anything is not valid. Its insulting, especially for someone who has spent time on all platforms and started on a cheap DOS machine...

To elaborate for those that want more performance out of their Apple's and for anyone wondering why someone with the tech know-how would ever buy into the apple ecosystem.

I use my laptop with 16 GB or RAM to simply control a linux machine running dual xeons with 36 GB or RAM. I need lots of RAM for the analysis. Controlling a linux server from a Mac is cake. It's BSD with all the perks including the ports tree for those that are familiar with BSD distros.Check out MacPorts or Fink or HomeBrew. I use Homebrew.Apple provides its own X11.app for [ssh -X] Xorg tunneling. I run crazy number crunching on the CPU/GPU of the linux box, effectively maxing it out 24/7 with different simulations or what have you.

On my macbook pro I run terminal.app, i ssh -X into my server. i can run whatever in bash or i can go into X11. I can access it from my train, I can access it from home, wherever. I don't have to mess with putty, or DOS. I set it up just as i would any other *nix box. Put my id_rsa.pub's [generated natively on OS X] into the linux servers .ssh files. I set up ~/.ssh/config like i would on any other linux machine. I run high performance shit side by side with photoshop and excel /matlab/mathematica for figures.

It fulfills the slogan: it just works. No cygwin, no 10 pound laptop, no putty/pscp or whatever, no VMWares, no wine.

i do play starcraft2...but i keep it on low settings. I always take out the DVDROM from my apple laptops and max out the RAM. In place of the DVDROM i put an OCZ SSD.

Thats my setup! Hope it sheds some light for those who don't take part in the apple world